The Blue That Refused to Be Stretched

The woman wanted enough blue for a wedding sash, no more, she said, than a hand’s width of cloth, and she wanted it the color of the sea before a storm decides which way to break. I told her the price before I told her anything else, because that is what Dye Lane taught me before it taught me to love the color at all: say the number first, and watch the face, and know everything else from how the face receives it.

Nineteen marks two drams the weight — the stalls have said it for a week now, and I have said it twice myself since yesterday, each time expecting my own mouth to soften it and each time finding it had not. There will be no more Serevan indigo until the ships run again, past Seedmonth, past the whole of the dark months between. What sits in my vat is what is left of last season’s lake-blue, and when it is gone, every bolt behind me in this workshop that still wants blue will have to learn to want something else, or wait, the way the harbor is waiting, the way I am waiting, though none of us say the word to each other.

She did not flinch at the number. She asked instead whether I could make it go further — water the dye, she said, thin it across twice the cloth, since a sash is narrow and no one examines a sash as closely as a bolt. I have heard this asked a hundred times by a hundred mouths that meant no harm by it, and I have refused it a hundred times, and the refusal does not get easier for repeating. A diluted blue is not a paler argument for the same color. It is a different color entirely, wearing blue’s name without blue’s weight, and I will not sell a woman a lie dressed as a bargain on the one day she will wear it in front of everyone who matters to her.

I dipped the cloth three times, full strength, the way the vat has always asked to be used, and charged her the whole of the number I gave her first. She paid without further argument. I do not know if she understood why I would not thin it, or only decided, watching my face the way I had watched hers, that the number was not moving regardless of what she asked of it.

What is left in the vat now is less than it was an hour ago, and the ships are still three months from sailing. I have begun, without deciding to, counting bolts the way Maro counts hides — not what I have sold, but what I am rationing, cloth by cloth, against a blue that will not come again until it comes.